Who Am I?

You might be asking yourself, just who the heck is this guy? Good question. I’m Douglas A Burton—father, husband, novelist, creative writer, and avid reader. I discovered my passion for storytelling while watching the great films of the 1980s and 90s. I fell in love with the films of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, John Milius, Nicholas Meyer, John Carpenter, Paul Verhoeven, and John Hughes. Sometime in 1998, I discovered the Hero’s Journey while visiting a Star Wars exhibit at the Museum of Science & Industry in Chicago. I bought a book in the gift shop called Star Wars: The Magic of Myth by Mary Henderson, which led me to Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Stricture for Writers and, eventually, The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.

I became obsessed.

The idea of secret but identifiable patterns in stories became something I studied in my spare time as if my life depended on it. I created an entire archive of movies that I mapped out in terms of their structure, patterns, and themes. Some stories mapped out perfectly with the hero’s journey, and some didn’t. By the 2000s, I had started the excellent habit of reading! I read an average of two books per month, devouring sci-fi, historical fiction, and consuming all the classics. Suddenly, in the jazz lounge of my imagination, Luke Skywalker, Neo, and Frodo were joined by Jane Eyre, Janie Crawford, and Nitta Sayuri. And like a high school mixer, these two groups of protagonists eyed each other with timid curiosity from across the room.

When the time came to study heroines in earnest, my voracious reading appetite led me to Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey: A Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, Hannah B. Harvey’s The Art of Storytelling: From Parents to Professionals, Gail Carriger’s The Heroine’s Journey, Maria Tartar’s The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, and Clarissa Pinkola-Estes’ The Women Who Run with Wolves just to name a few. My passion for stories is still hot, so I doubt my studies will end there.

Today, I live in Austin, TX with my beautiful wife, Crystal, and my two amazing sons, Jacob and Lucas. We enjoy a steady diet of little league baseball, school plays, and of course, movie nights.